The mayor of New Orleans, Ray Nagin, has suspended the reopening of large portions of the city and ordered most people to evacuate as the latest violent storm closes in on the battered region.
Tropical storm Rita has gathered strength after passing through the Bahamas yesterday and is expected to hit the coast of Florida before possibly moving to areas already devastated by Hurricane Katrina.
guardian.co.uk
WASHINGTON, Sept. 19 – A senior White House budget official who resigned abruptly last week was arrested Monday on charges of lying to investigators and obstructing a federal inquiry involving Jack Abramoff, the Republican lobbyist who has been under scrutiny by the Justice Department for more than a year.
The arrest of the official, David H. Safavian, head of procurement policy at the Office of Management and Budget, was the first to result from the wide-ranging corruption investigation of Mr. Abramoff, once among the most powerful and best-paid lobbyists in Washington and a close friend of Representative Tom DeLay, the House majority leader.
According to court papers, Mr. Safavian, 38, is accused of lying about assistance that he gave Mr. Abramoff in his earlier work at the General Services Administration, where he was chief of staff from 2002 to 2004, and about an expensive golf trip he took with the lobbyist to Scotland in August 2002.
Mr. Abramoff, a former lobbying partner of Mr. Safavian, was indicted last month in Florida on unrelated federal fraud charges. He is not identified by name in the court papers involving Mr. Safavian’s arrest. But “Lobbyist A” in an F.B.I. affidavit could only be Mr. Abramoff based on descriptive details in the documents filed in the Federal District Court here.
nytimes.com
He wasn’t an ‘ex-White House aide’ as of last Friday.
…et, as we see in Sen. Joe Biden’s (D) Washington Post op-ed today, top Democrats still can’t find the guts to push for withdrawing troops, and instead continue to drone on with the same split-the-difference posturing and weak-kneed whining that has marked their electoral decline in the last few years. As Atrios’s Duncan Black notes, all Biden and the D.C. Democratic Establishment seem to be able to muster is, “If only a bunch of stuff that won’t happen would happen, Iraq would be a lot of fun.”
This kind of pathetic cowering isn’t limited just to the Senate. Roll Call reports today that House Minority Whip Steny Hoyer (D) “has assembled a kitchen cabinet of fellow moderate Members to shape the Democratic strategy on national security issues.” What’s troubling is that every single member mentioned in the article as working with Hoyer recently voted against legislation to force President Bush to detail an exit strategy from Iraq. Similarly, nearly every member voted for the Iraq War (including Hoyer).
This apparent exclusion by D.C. Democratic Establishment types like Hoyer of those who want troops withdrawn from Iraq doesn’t seem inadvertent. In fact, it seems like Hoyer is going out of his way to put a thumb in the eye of the few courageous Democrats who are trying to get their party to take a real position on the war. As the article notes, Hoyer is unveiling his group’s agenda “just as some of the Caucus’ left-leaning Democrats are becoming ever more vocal about their opposition to the war in Iraq and heightening their call to bring U.S. forces home.”
commondreams.org
The United States will send four astronauts to the moon in 2018 in a return to its pioneering manned mission into space, NASA administrator Michael Griffin announced.
NASA is to design a new rocket based on the technology from its ageing shuttles that are to be retired in 2010, Griffin said Monday. The new rocket could be orbiting in space by 2014.
The last manned mission to the moon was the Apollo 17 rocket in 1972. But the new mission will enable preparations to set up a permanent base on the moon, Griffin said Monday.
The NASA chief estimated the cost of the moon programme at 104 billion dollars.
He said the new rocket would be “very Apollo-like, with updated technology. Think of it as Apollo on steroids.”
news.yahoo.com
The outpouring of billions of dollars in federal relief money to victims of Hurricane Katrina is raising concerns about the risks of corruption and cronyism, with Bush administration critics expressing the fear that the Gulf coast, like Iraq, could become another grand experiment in neoconservative ideology.
Already, no-bid contracts have been awarded to major Republican contributors including Kellogg, Brown & Root, the subsidiary of Vice President Dick Cheney’s old company Halliburton. President Bush has unilaterally lifted a protection law that makes it possible for contractors to pay sub-minimum wage rates to reconstruction workers.
Among provisions releasing more than $60bnto the disaster area meanwhile, is a rise in the limit on government-issued credits cards from $25,000 to $250,000. One Republican Senator, and the Democrats, have denounced this provision as outrageous and open to abuse.
Critics have been particularly disturbed by reports that Karl Rove, President Bush’s political brain who has no experience in disaster relief or urban planning, may be put in charge of the reconstruction effort. Since his speciality is fighting and winning elections, the concern is that he will want to redraw the electoral map of southern Louisiana and Mississippi before providing new homes or electricity and water.
independent.co.uk
Clinton Launches Withering Attack on Bush on Iraq, Katrina, Budget
On the US budget, Clinton warned that the federal deficit may be coming untenable, driven by foreign wars, the post-hurricane recovery programme and tax cuts that benefitted just the richest one percent of the US population, himself included.
“What Americans need to understand is that … every single day of the year, our government goes into the market and borrows money from other countries to finance Iraq, Afghanistan, Katrina, and our tax cuts,” he said.
“We have never done this before. Never in the history of our republic have we ever financed a conflict, military conflict, by borrowing money from somewhere else.”
Clinton added: “We depend on Japan, China, the United Kingdom, Saudi Arabia, and Korea primarily to basically loan us money every day of the year to cover my tax cut and these conflicts and Katrina. I don’t think it makes any sense.”
Obviously encouraged by the outgoing US ambassador to Israel Daniel Kurtzer’s statement that President Bush would back keeping larger West Bank colonial Jewish settlements under Israeli control in a permanent peace agreement with the Palestinians, Israel’s Prime Minister Sharon reiterated in Washington on Sunday that the major colony blocs “are going to be a part of Israel” and “contiguous with Israel,” including Jerusalem’s Ma’ale Adumim.
“In the context of a final status agreement, the United States will support the retention by Israel of areas with a high concentration of Israeli population,” Kurtzer said in an interview broadcast Sunday.
“The policy is exactly what the president (George W. Bush) said,” Kurtzer said in the prerecorded interview to Israel Radio.
Kurtzer, who completed his term Friday, cited an April 2004 letter from Bush to Ariel Sharon, setting out the US position on settlements.
“In light of new realities on the ground, including already existing major Israeli populations centers, it is unrealistic to expect that the outcome of final status negotiations will be a full and complete return to the armistice lines of 1949,” Bush wrote in the letter handed to Sharon during a visit to Washington on April 14 last year.
Bush’s letter, which also pledged that the United States will not support the Palestinian refugees’ “right of return” and said that a return to the prewar borders of 1949 was unlikely, was dubbed by Palestinian officials as a “New Balfor Declaration.”
When asked by The Jerusalem Post before leaving: “In a recent interview with The Jerusalem Post, Prime Minister Sharon referred to President George Bush’s letter of commitments from April 2004 as nothing less than an agreement. What is the status of this letter. Is it binding on the president that will come after Bush?” Kurtzer replied:
“Congress supported the letter in a resolution, but it was no concretized in law. But it carries great weight, not only because it is a commitment of the US, but it is in writing by the president. It is part of a package where the prime minister provided a letter to the president, the president provided a letter to the prime minister, and there were other attachments.”
palestine-pmc.com
Here’s the story re: Kurtzer the NY Times did NOT publish yesterday.
It’s not every day Amnesty International asks me to go see a Nic Cage movie. So, when I got their e-mail about “Lord of War,” I promptly caught a bargain matinee at my local multiplex. This is not a movie review but, by Hollywood standards, “Lord of War” rates R for radical…and I was pleased to witness a film about the governments and freelancers supplying the weapons that kill men, women, and children every minute of every day.
According to the Federation of American Scientists (http://www.fas.org):
*Half of the world’s governments spend more on defense than health care.
*The U.S. share of total world military expenditures per year has been roughly 36 percent, while comprising under 5 percent of the world’s population.
*The U.S. Arms Industry is the second most heavily subsidized industry after agriculture.
*2001 world military expenditures topped $839 billion, while at the same time an estimated 1.3 billion people survive on less than the equivalent of $1 (U.S.) a day.
*The International Red Cross has estimated that one out of every two casualties of war is a civilian caught in the crossfire.
*The United Nations estimates there to be over 300,000 child soldiers around the world, now serving as combatants in over 30 current conflicts.
*The Center for International Policy estimates that around 80% of U.S. arms exports to the developing world go to non-democratic regimes.
*There are more landmines planted in Cambodia than people. Cambodia is just one of 64 countries around the world littered with some 100 million anti-personnel landmines. Intended primarily to maim, landmines can lie in wait years after a conflict ends, causing 500 deaths and injuries per week.
*The U.S. government is training soldiers in upwards of 70 countries at any given time.
“Since the end of the Second World War, tens of millions of people have been killed by conventional weapons, mostly small arms such as rifles, machine guns and rocket-propelled grenade launchers,” reports Lowell Bergman of Frontline. “Low-tech, handheld weapons and explosives do the vast majority of the killing today. There are more than 550 million small arms currently in circulation, many of them fueling bloody civil strife in countries from Sri Lanka to Sierra Leone.”
And the home of the brave is the number one merchant of death. In 2004, the #2 and #3 weapons-exporting nations were France ($4.4 billion) and Russia ($4.6 billion). At #1 was the United States at $18.5 billion…and if that number alone isn’t enough to provoke action, consider where those weapons are going.
“The U.S. has a long-standing (and accelerating) policy of arming, training, and aiding some of the world’s most repressive regimes,” says Frida Berrigan, Senior Research Associate with the Arms Trade Resource Center of the World Policy Institute. “The U.S. transferred weaponry to 18 of the 25 countries involved in active conflicts in 2003, the last year for which full Pentagon data is available.”
informationclearinghouse.info
The day after Hurricane Katrina hit, exposing much of the public to the tragic conditions of poverty in America, the Census Bureau quietly released its annual report entitled, “Income, Poverty, and Health Insurance Coverage in the United States.” In some respects, it provided a demonstrable backdrop to the pockets of poverty common to New Orleans and other cities. It also explained why, despite President Bush’s assertion last month that, “Americans have more money in their pockets,” many people aren’t faring as well as they once did.
The report indicates that in 2004 there was no increase in average annual household incomes for black, white, or Hispanic families. In fact, this marks the first time since the Census Bureau began keeping records that household incomes failed to increase for five consecutive years. Since President Bush took office, the average annual household family income has declined by $2,572, approximately 4.8 percent.
Black families had the lowest average income last year, at $30,134. By comparison, the average income for white families was $48,977. The average pretax family income for all racial groups combined was $44,389, which is the lowest it has been since 1997. The South had the lowest average family income in 2004.
Interestingly enough, as the Economic Policy Institute notes in their analysis of the Census Bureau’s report, not all families did poorly last year. Although the portion of the total national income going to the bottom 60 percent of families did not increase last year, the portion going to the wealthiest five percent of families rose by 0.4 percent. And while the average inflation-adjusted family income of middle-class Americans declined by 0.7 percent in 2004, the wealthiest five percent of families enjoyed a 1.7 percent increase.
zmag.org
NOUMEA, New Caledonia (Reuters) – The initial outbreak of what could explode into a bird flu pandemic may affect only a few people, but the world will have just weeks to contain the deadly virus before it spreads and kills millions.
Chances of containment are limited because the potentially catastrophic infection may not be detected until it has already spread to several countries, like the SARS virus in 2003. Avian flu vaccines developed in advance will have little impact on the pandemic virus.
It will take scientists four to six months to develop a vaccine that protects against the pandemic virus, by which time thousands could have died. There is little likelihood a vaccine will even reach the country where the pandemic starts.
breitbart.com
by Robert Fisk
n an age when Lord Blair of Kut al-Amara can identify “evil ideologies” and al-Qa’ida can call the suicide bombing of 156 Iraqi Shias “good news” for the “nation of Islam”, thank heaven for our readers, in particular John Shepherd, principal lecturer in religious studies at St Martin’s College, Lancaster.
Responding to a comment of mine – to the effect that “deep down” we do, however wrongly, suspect that religion has something to do with the London bombings – Mr Shepherd gently admonishes me. “I wonder if there may be more to it than that,” he remarks. And I fear he is right and I am wrong.
His arguments are contained in a brilliantly conceived article on the roots of violence and extremism in Judaism, Christianity and Islam – and the urgent need to render all religions safe for “human consumption”.
Put very simply, Mr Shepherd takes a wander through some of the nastiest bits of the Bible and the Koran – those bits we prefer not to quote or not to think about – and finds that mass murder and ethnic cleansing get a pretty good bill of health if we take it all literally.
The Jewish “entry into the promised land” was clearly accompanied by bloody conquest and would-be genocide. The Christian tradition has absorbed this inheritance, entering its own “promised land” with a ruthlessness that extends to cruel anti-Semitism. The New Testament, Mr Shepherd points out, “contains passages that would … be actionable under British laws against incitement to racial hatred” were they to be published fresh today.
The Muslim tradition – with its hatred of idolatry – contains, in the career of the Prophet, “scenes of bloodshed and murder which are shocking to modern religious sensibilities”.
Thus, for example, Baruch Goldstein, the Israeli military doctor who massacred 29 Palestinians in Hebron in 1994, committed his mass murder on Purim, a festival celebrating the deliverance of the Jewish communities from the Persian empire which was followed by large-scale killing “to avenge themselves on their enemies” (Esther 8:13).
The Palestinians, of course, were playing the role of the Persians, at other times that of the Amalekites (“… kill man and woman, babe and suckling, ox and sheep, camel and donkey” – 1, Samuel 15:1, 3). The original “promised land” was largely on what is now the West Bank – hence the Jewish colonisation of Palestinian land – while the coastal plain was not (although suggestions that Israel should transplant itself further east, leaving Haifa, Tel Aviv and Ashkelon to the Palestinians of the West Bank are unlikely to commend themselves to Israel’s rulers).
The “chosen people” theme, meanwhile, moved into Christianity – the Protestants of Northern Ireland, for example, (remember the Ulster Covenant?), and apartheid South Africa and, in some respects, the United States.
The New Testament is laced with virulent anti-Semitism, accusing the Jews of killing Christ. Read Martin Luther. The Koran demanded the forced submission of conquered peoples in the name of religion (the Koran 9:29), and Mohammed’s successor, the Caliph Abu Bakr, stated specifically that “we will treat as an unbeliever whoever rejects Allah and Mohammed, and we will make holy war upon him … for such there is only the sword and fire and indiscriminate slaughter.”
So there you go. And how does Mr Shepherd deal with all this? Settlement policy should be rejected not because it is theologically questionable but because the dispossession of a people is morally wrong. Anti-Semitism must be rejected not because it is incompatible with the Gospels but because it is incompatible with any basic morality based on shared human values.
If Muslim violence is to be condemned, it is not because Mohammed is misunderstood but because it violates basic human rights. “West Bank settlements, Christian anti-Semitism and Muslim terrorism … are not morally wrong because theologically questionable – they are theologically questionable because morally wrong.”
And it is true that most Christians, Jews and Muslims draw on the tolerant, moderate aspects of their tradition. We prefer not to accept the fact that the religions of the children of Abraham are inherently flawed in respect of intolerance, discrimination, violence and hatred. Only – if I understand Mr Shepherd’s thesis correctly – by putting respect for human rights above all else and by making religion submit to universal human values can we ” grasp the nettle”.
Phew. I can hear the fundamentalists roaring already. And I have to say it will probably be the Islamic ones who will roar loudest. Reinterpretation of the Koran is such a quicksand, so dangerous to approach, so slippery a subject that most Muslims will not go near.
How can we suggest that a religion based on “submission” to God must itself “submit” to our happy-clappy, all-too-Western ” universal human rights”? I don’t know. Especially when we ” Christians” have largely failed to condemn some of our own atrocities – indeed, have preferred to forget them.
Take the Christians who massacred the Muslims of Srebrenica. Or take the Christians – Lebanese Phalangist allies of the Israelis – who entered the Sabra and Chatila refugee camps in Beirut and slaughtered up to 1,700 Palestinian Muslim civilians.
Do we remember that? Do we recall that the massacres occurred between 16 and 18 September 1982? Yes, today is the 23rd anniversary of that little genocide – and I suspect The Independent will be one of the very few newspapers to remember it. I was in those camps in 1982. I climbed over the corpses. Some of the Christian Phalangists in Beirut even had illustrations of the Virgin Mary on their gun butts, just as the Christian Serbs did in Bosnia.
Are we therefore in a position to tell our Muslim neighbours to “grasp the nettle”? I rather think not. Because the condition of human rights has been so eroded by our own folly, our illegal invasion of Iraq and the anarchy that we have allowed to take root there, our flagrant refusal to prevent further Israeli settlement expansion in the West Bank, our constant, whining demands that prominent Muslims must disown the killers who take their religious texts too literally, that we have long ago lost our moral compass.
A hundred years of Western interference in the Middle East has left the region so cracked with fault lines and artificial frontiers and heavy with injustices that we are in no position to lecture the Islamic world on human rights and values. Forget the Amalekites and the Persians and Martin Luther and the Caliph Abu Bakr. Just look at ourselves in the mirror and we will see the most frightening text of all.
informationclearinghouse.info